Prof. Bluraenbach on the Irritability of the Tongue. £6$ 
Nor was I more fortunate in searching the writers upon Gal- 
vanism, as it is commonly termed, in which also I found my- 
self baffled in the hopes which I had cherished. 
In the great and immortal physiological work of Haller, 
which may be considered as forming the pandect of that study, 
all that is said upon the subject is contained within the short 
limit of a remark of three words, namely, “ irritabilitate lingua 
gaudet ,” — the tongue possesses irritability *. 
As nothing, therefore, was to be gained by consulting authors, 
I began the more diligently to observe for myself, and, whenever 
an opportunity presented, cut out the tongues of warm-blooded 
.animals, which had been killed for other purposes, of dogs, cats, 
goats, sheep and rabbits, and in all these, although there was 
a considerable difference in different individuals, even of the 
same species, I was struck with the irritability of the yet warm 
tongue, under the excitement of chemical as well as mechanical 
stimuli ; of which experiment I may adduce one in the present 
place, as exactly corresponding with the description of Ovid. 
I had the tongue of a four-year-old ox, which had been killed 
in the common way, by opening the large vessels of the neck, 
cut out in my presence, while yet warm, and at the same time 
the heart, in order that I might compare the oscillatory motion 
of this organ, which is by far the most irritable that we are ac- 
quainted with, with the motion of the tongue. And when I ex- 
cited both viscera at the same time by the same mechanical sti- 
muli, namely incisions of a knife, and pricks of a needle, the di- 
vided tongue appeared to all the bystanders to survive the 
heart, by more than seven minutes, and to retain the oscillations 
of its fibres altogether for a quarter of an hour ; and so vivid 
were the movements, when I cut across the fore part of the 
tongue, that the butcher’s wife compared them to those of an 
eel in a similar condition, quite in the way that Ovid has com- 
pared them to the motions of the tail of a mutilated snake. 
To these observations made upon animals, I may add here a 
similar one made upon the human tongue itself, the knowledge 
of which I owe to my excellent friend and much respected col- 
league, lleimar. 
* De corporis humani Fabrica et Functionibus, t. vii. p. 310. 
